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Cracking the media management puzzle through insights, solutions and data. ▪️Website — http://thefix.media ▪️Newsletter— http://bit.ly/2Tsr0M9 Reach out: @thefixmediabot
What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: Five years of The Fix; paywallisation & alternatives to Substack
▪️The articles featured pertain to the story of one media manager from Serbia to Canada, and how Ghost is catching up with Substack;
▪️Interesting insights on Denník N acquisition of a minority stake in a Czech lifestyle magazine for women, and how the politicization of fact-checking has contributed to a decline in the number of fact-checking sites globally from our colleagues at Médiář and Axios;
▪️Great opportunities from Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, BBC Studios, and more.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
✌️ Good evening! Here is the recap of the stories we published this week:
🧑🎓 How Predrag Blagojevic built and left Južne vesti;
👻 Ghost's impressive growth amid Substack fatigue.
📍And, our AI course is underway. This week, Alberto Puliafito reviewed the basics of Artificial Intelligences for journalists. Sign up for free to receive eight weekly instalments.
The advantages that made Substack strong in its early days are now pushing major users, including European media, towards other platforms, such as Ghost. Romain Chauvet looks into the trend.
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What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: Lessons from the Nordics
▪️The articles featured pertain to lessons from Swedish Radio's AI strategy, and insights into the work of a travel journalist;
▪️Interesting insights on Vice's debuting its first subscription product, and publishers building audiences on WhatsApp from our colleagues at Adweek and The New York Times;
▪️Great opportunities from Earth Journalism Network, and The Economist.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
How do you balance working as a travel journalist with travelling sustainably and cutting back on flying? We spoke with Lyon-based Anna Richards about her work as a freelance travel and outdoors journalist.
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What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: Zetland’s Finnish expansion; launches and acquisitions
▪️The articles featured pertain to one case of young journalists redefining journalism in Lebanon, and Zetland’s member-centric model's expansion to Finland with Uusi Juttu;
▪️Interesting insights on The Washington Post's high-profile test of micropayments, and Google’s AI-powered research assistance service from our colleagues at Nieman Lab;
▪️Great opportunities from the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, and Global Investigative Journalism Network.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
Earlier this year, we spoke with Brian Morrissey, the author of The Rebooting, about the launch of his membership program, the woes of general news publishers, interesting niche players, and advice for established news players hoping to survive ongoing turmoil.
◼ Morrissey traces many current struggles back to general interest publications losing competitive advantages with the rise of the internet. Another core issue is that people want less news overall – a demand curve no business in any other industry would ignore.
◼ What gives him hope? Apart from The New York Times and a handful of other big players, successful players are smaller and more flexible. “They are building businesses around those specific areas,” he notes.
◼ What can help established news outlets? Lobbying for money from the governments and negotiating with big tech companies might be useful to a handful of big publishers, but most news organisations won’t survive a strong growth agenda and a sharp focus.
◼ A throughline in Morrissey’s writing is the advice to do “more with less”, learning how to stay lean and use resources effectively while focusing on what’s important. Diversifying revenue is another important piece. Subscriptions or advertising alone are unlikely to save a publisher, you need a healthy mix of different streams.
◼ After leaving Digiday in late 2020 to found The Rebooting Morrissey started with relying on advertising as the core revenue stream, but over the past years he started doing events, research reports, and other ways to monetise his work.
◼ Most recently Morrissey launched his own membership program, which offers two tiers. He has sold more of higher-tier subscriptions than he had expected thanks to his community of media operators and С-level executives.
📍 Learn more about doing more with less in the full article.
What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: AI for newsrooms; unique French outlets from Central Europe
▪️The articles featured pertain to the challenges faced by small French media outlets from the Balkans and Central Europe, and an initiative helping kickstart AI projects in the news industry;
▪️Interesting insights on UK news publishers increasingly asking readers to pay to opt out of sharing personal data for advertising, and how mobile newsrooms are restoring citizens’ faith in journalism” in Macedonia and Latvia from our colleagues at Press Gazette, and OCCRP;
▪️Great opportunities from The Kyiv Independent, European Media and Information Fund, and Internews.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
AI is becoming a must-use technology for newsrooms, but smaller publishers face a lot of barriers.
👩💻 In this partner article sponsored by Atex, we look into the Atex AI Challenge, a new accelerator program that helps newsrooms and journalists kickstart their AI projects.
Artificial Intelligence is shifting the media landscape. Stay ahead of the curve with “AI for Journalists and Newsrooms” – a free 8-part email course from The Fix.
Authored by Slow News’ editor-in-chief and AI expert Alberto Puliafito, this course offers:
🧠 The basics of AI in journalism
🔎 How to approach covering AI
📝 AI for research and news gathering
📈 AI for SEO and social media management
✔️ AI for fact-checking
🗓 The course debuts on September 26th with the first email instalment, followed by weekly lessons.
📍 Sign up for free now to receive the first part on the launch date followed by seven more weekly instalments!
✌️ Good evening! Here is the full list of stories we had this week, including European outlets' approach to US elections, five lessions from media leaders, and Perplexity's partnerships with major publishers.
🗳 Covering American elections for European audience;
✍️ Insights on going from a reporter to a manager;
🧠 How one AI company approaches work with news media.
Earlier this year, we spoke with Jennifer Mizgata, a consultant and coach who specialises in improving work culture in newsrooms, about what it takes to build a better newsroom culture for both new and established media organisations. Here’s a roundup of seven tips from her.
1️⃣ Start building a healthy newsroom culture early, but catching up later is better than giving up altogether.
2️⃣ When building a new organisation, provide structure and guidance on how people should work together: it’s okay for them to ask about how to do things and get feedback, and people should know where to go.
3️⃣ Be conscious of communicating organisational values whether it’s a 3-person or a 25-person team. Communicating the values externally, to the communities the newsroom serves is also important but often overlooked by media leaders.
4️⃣ Avoid leadership bottlenecks by normalising handing off responsibilities: Instead of the editor-in-chief being the only one who can sign off on story ideas, empower section editors to make those calls. Try to create clear everyday work processes.
5️⃣ For distributed teams, be mindful of communicating availability and work preferences: Try team norming. At the beginning of projects, check in around what people’s communication styles are, how they would prefer to get information.
6️⃣ For established organisations, use inflection points to make changes more natural and minimise internal resistance.
7️⃣ Start with small actions and experiments. This could be something as minor as asking at the beginning of every meeting how people are showing up today, or building in 10 minutes for feedback at the end of a standing meeting.
📍 Find more useful advice in the full article.
What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: The print is (not) the future; Afghan media in exile
▪️The articles featured pertain to how Russian news outlets overcome the Kremlin's restrictions on YouTube, how online games can be leveraged, and Wikipedia's role in media;
▪️Interesting insights on “three unsolved mysteries” around Telegram's Pavel Durov’s connections with France and its leadership, Bulgarian publisher Capital's subscription model and AI strategy, and how The Atlantic cooperated across teams to launch a new product feature – gifting articles from our colleagues at Politico, Media Finance Monitor, and The Audiencers;
▪️Great opportunities from Journalismfund Europe, The Telegraph, and Public Interest Journalism Lab.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
✌️ Good evening! Here is the full list of stories we had this week, including how Russian news outlets overcome the Kremlin's restrictions on YouTube, how online games can be leveraged, and Wikipedia's role in media.
▶️ How Russian independent media deals with the slowdown of YouTube in the country;
🧩 Tips on how to use of online games to your advantage;
📚 Wikipedia's lessons for news organisations.
We spoke with Stephen Harrison, tech journalist who covers Wikipedia, about the platform’s role as “internet infrastructure” and its lessons for news organisations.
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🎂 The Fix Media turns 5! 🎉
This month, we mark a special milestone – the 5th anniversary of The Fix Media! What started as a project covering news media specifically in Europe, focusing on underrepresented markets has grown into a vibrant community of readers, writers, and industry enthusiasts.
We're grateful to each and every one of you who has been a part of this journey.
Over the past five years, we’ve become a trade publication for media professionals, bringing value to leaders both in newsrooms and in other walks of the media industry, as well as reporting on solutions and offering practical insights – rather than just pontificating about the problems.
Cheers to the next chapter! 🥂
P.S.
Would you like to help make The Fix better for the next five years? Take our editorial survey to offer your feedback.
Those who fill out the survey by November 1st will be entered to win one free professional consultation and two €50 Amazon vouchers.
Earlier this year, we spoke with Brian Morrissey, the author of The Rebooting, about the launch of his membership program, the woes of general news publishers, interesting niche players, and advice for established news players hoping to survive ongoing turmoil.
◼ Morrissey traces many current struggles back to general interest publications losing competitive advantages with the rise of the internet. Another core issue is that people want less news overall – a demand curve no business in any other industry would ignore.
◼ What gives him hope? Apart from The New York Times and a handful of other big players, successful players are smaller and more flexible. “They are building businesses around those specific areas,” he notes.
◼ What can help established news outlets? Lobbying for money from the governments and negotiating with big tech companies might be useful to a handful of big publishers, but most news organisations won’t survive a strong growth agenda and a sharp focus.
◼ A throughline in Morrissey’s writing is the advice to do “more with less”, learning how to stay lean and use resources effectively while focusing on what’s important. Diversifying revenue is another important piece. Subscriptions or advertising alone are unlikely to save a publisher, you need a healthy mix of different streams.
◼ After leaving Digiday in late 2020 to found The Rebooting Morrissey started with relying on advertising as the core revenue stream, but over the past years he started doing events, research reports, and other ways to monetise his work.
◼ Most recently Morrissey launched his own membership program, which offers two tiers. He has sold more of higher-tier subscriptions than he had expected thanks to his community of media operators and С-level executives.
📍 Learn more about doing more with less in the full article.
For the latest instalment of our media job series, we spoke with Predrag Blagojevic about how he built a big independent media in Serbia – and why he had to walk away.
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The job of a war correspondent is invaluable. They risk their lives to report stories about the military conflict, its aftermath, and the people affected. To shed light on this work, last year we spoke with Nastya Stanko, a prominent Ukrainian war journalist, who has been covering Russia’s aggression against Ukraine since 2014, and returned to being a full-time war reporter in 2022. She now serves as the chief editor of the investigative outlet Slidstvo.info.
▪ In 2022 and early 2023, @NastyaStanko reported for hromadske from Bakhmut, Kherson, Izyum, Kupyansk, Lyman, and other hotspots of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Her planning process for a trip to the frontline could take up to a week, and the team published approximately three reports after each trip.
▪ Coordinating with the military press officers is the most time-consuming aspect of her work, which involves planning and finalising materials. Transcribing the materials also takes a lot of time – she prefers to do it herself to ensure accuracy.
▪ The work is intense during shoots, often starting at 4-5 AM, and sometimes requiring spending nights in military shelters. Stanko recounts staying in a basement with the military for three nights to avoid attracting attention.
▪ At the frontline, she usually left early, coordinating with the military to pick her team up from the agreed location and take them to their positions. They shoot for the whole day and sometimes at night if there’s enough lighting.
▪ To Stanko, it is essential to share these stories so that people are aware of the reality. Despite the challenges and risks involved, Stanko feels when reporting from the frontline she is doing what she does best and hopes her work makes a difference.
▪ According to Stanko, war journalists must be prepared to invest time, understand the military structure, manage limitations and obstacles, update information continuously, develop skills and experience gradually, and know the local communication system.
📍 Learn more about Stanko’s previous role and the challenges associated with it in the full article.
We recently spoke with Olle Zachrison, Head of Artificial Intelligence & News Strategy at Swedish Radio, about their innovative approach to AI. During the interview, he revealed how to potentially gain 1.4 million new consumers and improve content recommendation using AI.
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🇱🇧 The Fix's Gentiana Pacarizi spoke with Naqd Media, a non-traditional media venture in Lebanon that combines marketing operations with reporting for a younger audience.
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💭 “It is my dream to show that this membership-based and value-based journalism is not a Nordic phenomenon, or something that can be found in small countries”, Zetland’s Jacob Moll says.
We spoke with him & Antti Pikkanen about Zetland’s new Finnish sibling Uusi Juttu.
In last year's interview with The Fix, Thomas Seymat, who is currently Head of Innovation and Digital for News at ARTE, recounted how he made the switch from content production to his previous role as Editorial Projects and Development Manager at Euronews, how he learned to improve as an editorial project manager, and what others can learn from his experience.
◼ Thomas Seymat had been at Euronews for almost 12 years. After a decade-long journalistic career, he joined the business development team in March 2021. He describes his last position there as a “bridge role” between business development and the newsroom.
◼ Work processes were noticeably different from the times Seymat worked as a journalist. “Contrary to a newsroom role, I don’t really have a day-to-day [work routine]. It’s more like week-to-week rituals and meetings”, Seymat told The Fix.
◼ Thomas Seymat says his switch from journalism to project management happened gradually over many years. When a proposal he championed received external funding to develop 360° videos, Seymat became a de-facto project manager – “without really any dedicated training or really knowing what it was”.
◼ Seymat believes that every journalist has some skills that are useful in project management: splitting a bigger task into smaller ones, getting from an idea to an objective to a deliverable, “is something that journalists do every day”.
◼ One of the hardest challenges in project management is influencing without authority. None of the journalists and newsroom managers Seymat workув with reported directly to him, yet he had to get them to do things on top of their already demanding day jobs.
◼ For those looking to transition from reporting to project management, a practical piece of advice is to find the money for a project, such as by applying for a grant. This will automatically make you the most obvious option for managing the work you helped fund.
◼ The shift requires “changing the mindset”, Seymat says. As a project manager you don’t have the luxury of publishing something quickly and moving on, you need to adopt a longer-term perspective.
📍 Learn more about Seymat’s experience of switching to project management in the full article.
⚡️ New from The Fix – a story of Le Courrier des Balkans & Le Courrier d'Europe centrale, two French-speaking media outlets from the Balkans and Central Europe.
How do they work – and manage to survive?
What's Inside The Fix Weekly Newsletter: From reporter to manager; US elections coverage in Europe
▪️The articles featured pertain to European outlets' approach to US elections, five lessons from media leaders, and Perplexity's partnerships with major publishers;
▪️Interesting insights on whether to block AI bots from accessing your content, how to work with Reddit, and how Brazilians “carve out new digital homes” amid the ban of X from our colleagues at A Media Operator, Digiday, and AP;
▪️Great opportunities from JournalismAI, and Media Development Investment Fund.
📍 Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for more news on the European media space!
For our latest article, Priyal Shah spoke with Perplexity's spokesperson Sara Platnick about how the AI company structured its deals with news publishers, such as TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, and The Texas Tribune.
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We compiled five insights for journalists hoping to pivot from chasing stories to steering entire teams with tips from our interviews with Raju Narisetti, Kait Bolongaro, Gerbert van Loenen, Brad Wolverton, and Thomas Seymat.
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Ahead of the US elections we spoke with SME, EURACTIV, and Deutsche Welle about their approach to covering this major event and how it fits with their editorial strategy.
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Gerbert van Loenen, Director of Campus at DPG Media, told us last year how his company conducts internal training for its employees and what topics are most in demand, how he balances his different roles, and what makes for a good trainer.
▪ DPG Media’s Training and Innovation Center offers three types of training activities: in-person sessions for journalists from different newsrooms across the company, bespoke events for one newsroom specifically, and webinars.
▪ Out of 2,100 journalists who work for DPG Media, more than half participate in trainings at least once a year. Generative AI and mobile storytelling are among the most popular topics, along with more bread-and-butter subjects like editing text and crafting headlines.
▪ The eight-people team includes several program managers who are responsible for developing training sessions and sometimes act as trainers themselves, an innovation manager whose internal newsletter on the latest media developments is widely read, and a staff member in charge of logistics.
▪ Although organising training is the team’s core activity today, their remit is broader. “We want to be a centre of excellence about innovation”, its leader notes, via other activities like an internal newsletter and collaboration with universities to produce research that could inform newsrooms’ work.
▪ An important part of Van Loenen’s job has been to motivate other journalists. Although news media have had their share of problems in recent years, he says the role of journalism during the crisis gives him hope and helps inspire others.
📍 Learn more about Van Loenen’s role and his vision in the full article.
More and more media across Europe are banking on online gaming platforms to gain visitors, subscriptions, and, ultimately, revenue. It’s a strategy that can pay off, Romain Chauvet writes for The Fix.
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